Attributed to Hans Hofmann, no coa, private collection, medium: acrylic measurements: 30"HX37"W framed, mint condition Biography: Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Hofmann's art is generally distinguished by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, development of spatial illusion through the “push and pull” of color, shape and placement, and use of bold, often primary color for expressive means.[4] In the first decades of the century, he painted in a modernist, though still identifiably representational style, creating landscapes, still lifes and portraits largely influenced by Cubism and Cézanne in terms of form, and Kandinsky, Matisse and Van Gogh in terms of color. He began an extended period focused solely on drawing sometime in the 1920s, returning to painting in 1935.By 1940, however, he began to paint completely abstract works such as Spring, a small oil on panel “drip” painting. Art historians have described that work, and others such as The Wind (1942), Fantasia (1943) and Effervescence (1944), in terms of their “painterly attacks,” jolting contrasts, rich color, and gestural spontaneity as “records of the artist’s intense experience” of paint, color, and processes that were arbitrary, accidental and direct, as well as intentional.They demonstrate Hofmann's early stylistic experimentation with the techniques that would be termed “action painting,” which Pollock and others made famous by the end of the decade. Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at important reality, once stating that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary, so that the necessary may speak.”